My current contract at work is coming to a close (yawn: work talk) and I requested lots of time off before something new comes along. A few coworkers were very confused as to what I was going to do with all this time. I guess this is maybe a difference in culture or interests. I have plenty of things to do and really time is all I need. I recently finished reading Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy and they talk about how contractors polish up their skills at the end of a contract. This is exactly what I wanted to do even before reading about it.

So with one week off, here’s what I did:

Ordered an arduino and got through an entire starter book with little exercises and electronics tutorials.

Got a vector domokun rendered using only lines.

Started and finished Prey by Michael Crichton.

Did my taxes, got my piano tuned, got my oil changed (2 attempts), 2 dentist appointments and had our water heater repaired. The rest of the time was spent watching movies, surfing, listening to old podcasts that I was very much behind on or practicing piano (piano ate a ton of time up). Actually, the raw piano time has really helped my chops.

And for a split second in this time, I realized how dead this blog is. Most likely, I’ll shut it down soon and just start using twitter and flickr.